Naturalistic production research has reported that, unlike monolingual peers, children acquiring Spanish as a heritage language omit Differential Object Marking (DOM) with animate objects since the earliest stages of language development. However, the previous studies investigating longitudinal monolingual and bilingual corpora cannot be compared to each other given their different treatment of language-internal variation in DOM use along the animacy scale. Whereas monolingual results excluded contexts predicted to be variable, bilingual results combined them with categorical contexts increasing the rate of “errors” in the bilingual group. This study reexamines naturalistic production by monolingual and early bilingual children as well as by their caregivers using a common methodology that distinguishes categorical from variable DOM contexts. The results indicate that longitudinal corpora covering child heritage speakers’ development up to age three do not show evidence of greater omission of DOM compared to monolingual children once variability along the animacy scale is accounted for. By contrast, young monolingual and bilingual children’s use of Spanish DOM seems target-like based on their input.

中文翻译：

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变化与偏差

自然主义生产研究报告称，与单语同龄人不同，学习西班牙语作为传统语言的儿童从语言发展的最早阶段起就忽略了带有动画物体的差异物体标记（DOM）。然而，之前调查纵向单语和双语语料库的研究无法相互比较，因为它们对 DOM 使用中的语言内部变异的处理方式不同。单语结果排除了预计可变的上下文，而双语结果将它们与分类上下文结合起来，增加了双语组的“错误”率。这项研究使用区分分类 DOM 上下文和可变 DOM 上下文的通用方法重新审视了单语和早期双语儿童及其照顾者的自然主义生产。结果表明，一旦考虑了生命力量表的变异性，涵盖传统儿童至三岁发展的纵向语料库并没有显示出与单语儿童相比，DOM 遗漏更多的证据。相比之下，年轻的单语和双语儿童对西班牙语 DOM 的使用似乎基于他们的输入而具有目标性。